An MTC User Equipment (MTC UE) is also called as a Machine-to-Machine (M2M) user communication device, which is a main application form of the internet of things at the present stage. Low power consumption and low cost are important guarantees for large-scale application. A smart metering device is one of most typical applications of an MTC device. M2M devices deployed on the market currently are mainly based on a Global System of Mobile communication (GSM) system.
Recently, the spectral efficiency of Long Term Evolution (LTE) is high, so more and more mobile operators determine LTE as an evolution direction of a future broadband wireless communication system. LTE-based M2M multi-type data services will be more attractive. However, only when the cost of an LTE-M2M device is lower than that of an MTC terminal of a GSM system, M2M services can be truly transferred from GSM to LTE systems.
The cost of the MTC UE mainly includes cost from baseband processing and radio frequency, and reducing a reception bandwidth of a downlink data channel of the UE is a very effective way to reduce the cost of the MTC UE. By means of further analysis, reducing a radio frequency bandwidth slightly affects the cost, and therefore the cost can be effectively reduced by reducing a baseband processing bandwidth of the UE. A downlink reception bandwidth of the MTC UE can be set as a small bandwidth, such as 1.4 MHZ or 3 MHz, supported by the LTE system. That is, a maximum support downlink system bandwidth of the MTC UE is usually smaller than a maximum reception bandwidth 20 MHz required by a conventional LTE terminal (Ordinary Legacy R8/9/10 UE, OLUE) under a single carrier. In a current LTE system, a Physical Downlink Shared Channel (PDSCH) is configured to transmit a system common message, a paging message and a downlink data service, and a specific frequency domain position of the PDSCH in a subframe is indicated by a Physical Downlink Control Channel (PDCCH). Before decoding a data service, a traditional LTE terminal needs to cache PDSCH data within the whole system bandwidth. Data caching for the whole system bandwidth is contrary to reduction of the cost of the MTC UE.
When the low-cost reception bandwidth-limited MTC UE accesses to the LTE system, the first problem to be solved is how to determine a frequency domain position of a small bandwidth. An existing solution mainly uses an additional system message to indicate a frequency domain position where data of the low-cost reception bandwidth-limited MTC UE is sent, and frequency domain sending positions of system common information and UE specific information are not correspondingly distinguished. Based on the existing solution, data may be transmitted wrongly, and the utilization rate of resources is low.